Seven English Cities

by William Dean Howells

III

I do not pretend this search for the battle-field of Marston Moor was the most exciting episode of my stay in York. In fact, I think it was much surpassed in a climax of dramatic poignancy incident to our excursion to Bishopsthorpe, down the Ouse, on one of the cosey little steamers which ply the stream without unreasonably crowding it against its banks. It was a most silvery September afternoon when we started from the quay at York, and after escaping from embarkment on a boat going in the wrong direction, began, with no unseemly swiftness, to scuttle down the current. It was a perfect voyage, as perfect as any I ever made on the Mississippi, the Ohio, the St. Lawrence, or the Hudson, on steamers in whose cabins our little boat would have lost itself. We had a full but not crowded company of passengers, overflowing into a skiff at our stern, in which a father and mother, with three women friends, preferred the high excitement of being towed to Bishopsthorpe, where it seemed that the man of the party knew the gardener. With each curve of the river and with each remove we got the city in more and more charming retrospective, till presently its roofs and walls and spires and towers were lost in the distance, and we were left to the sylvan or pastoral loveliness of the low shores. Here and there at a pleasant interval from the river a villa rose against a background of rounded tree tops, with Lombardy poplars picking themselves out before it, but for the most part the tops of the banks, with which we stood even on our deck, retreated from the waterside willows in levels of meadow-land, where white and red cows were grazing, and now and then young horses romping away from groups of their elders. It was all dear and kind and sweet, with a sort of mid-Western look in its softness (as the English landscape often has), and the mud-banks were like those of my native Ohio Valley rivers. The effect was heightened, on our return, by an aged and virtuously poor (to all appearance) flageolet and cornet band, playing ‘Way down upon the Suwanee River, while the light played in “ditties no-tone” over the groves and pastures of the shore, and the shadows stretched themselves luxuriously out as if for a long night’s sleep. There has seldom been such a day since I began to grow old; a soft September gale ruffled and tossed the trees finely, and a subtle Italian quality mixed with the American richness of the sunshiny air; so that I thought we reached Bishopsthorpe only too soon, and I woke from a pleasant reverie to be told that the steamer could not land with us, but we must be taken ashore in the small boat which we saw putting out for us from its moorings. To this day I do not know why the steamer could not land, but perhaps the small boat had a prescriptive right in the matter. At any rate, it was vigorously manned by a woman, who took tuppence from each of us for her service, and presently earned it by the interest she showed in our getting to the Archbishop’s palace, or villa, the right way.

So we went round by an alluring road to its forking, where, looking up to the left, we could see a pretty village behind Lombardy poplars, and coming down toward us in a victoria for their afternoon drive, two charmingly dressed ladies, with bright parasols, and looking very county-family, as we poor Americans imagine such things out of English fiction. We entered the archiepiscopal grounds through a sympathetic Gothic screen, as I will call the overture to the Gothic edifice in my defect of architectural terminology, though perhaps gateway would be simpler; and found ourselves in the garden, and in the company of those people we had towed down behind our steamer. They were with their friend, the gardener, and, claiming their acquaintance as fellow-passengers, we made favor with him to see the house. The housekeeper, or some understudy of hers, who received us, said the family were away, but she let us follow her through. That is more than I will let the reader do, for I know the duty of the cultivated American to the intimacies of the gentle English life; it is only with the simple life that I ever make free; there, I own, I have no scruple. But I will say (with my back turned conscientiously to the interior) that nothing could be lovelier than the outlook from the dining-room, and the whole waterfront of the house, on the wavy and willowy Ouse, and that I would willingly be many times an archbishop to have that prospect at all my meals.